Beth Karlin

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of Southern California

Abstract Existing needs to manage flood risk in the United States are underserved by available flood hazard information. This contributes to an alarming escalation of flood impacts amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars per year and countless disrupted lives and affected communities. Making information about flood hazards useful for the range...

The burgeoning smart home market brings opportunities for home energy management systems (HEMS). Despite hundreds of smart HEM products on the market and many invested stakeholders, consumer adoption is lagging behind expectations. Past research in this space has focused on smart home technology (SHT) in general, rather than particular products wit...

There are high hopes for smart home technology to deliver Home Energy Management (HEM) solutions, including through smart thermostats, plugs, lights, switches, and appliances. However, adoption of these technologies is lagging behind expectations. Moreover, it is unclear how energy management features in the smart home consumer adoption process. We...

Understanding the impact of digital, interactive flood hazard maps and flood control systems on public flood risk perception could enhance risk communication and management. This study analyzed a survey of residents living near California’s Newport Bay Estuary and found that self-rated nonspatial perceptions of dread or concern over future flood im...

Policymakers worldwide are currently discussing whether to include home energy management (HEM) products in their portfolio of technologies to reduce carbon emissions and improve grid reliability. However, very little data is available about these products. Here we present the results of an extensive review including 308 HEM products available on t...

Technologies providing opportunities for home energy management have been on the rise in recent years, however, it's not clear how well the technology - as its currently being developed - will be able to deliver energy saving or demand shifting benefits. The current study undertakes an analysis of 308 home energy management (HEM) products to identi...

Engaging the public to decrease their carbon footprint via energy feedback has become a significant topic of both study and practice and understanding how to best leverage technology for this purpose is an ideal question for the field of HCI to address. One common example is Home Energy Reports (HERs) and Business energy reports (BERs), which are p...

This report explores the potential role utilities may play in the emerging home energy management (HEM) marketplace and develops a roadmap to leverage, promote, and enable the use of these technologies for energy savings and grid load reduction. It takes a comprehensive view of HEMS by evaluating the evolving market in which they are developing, th...

The Anthropocene presents governments with a unique and increasingly complex set of environmental challenges that many are ill-prepared to address. Both the frequency and the severity of impacts are expected to grow in the coming decades and governments are facing pressure to provide increasingly costly services to the public with fewer resources....

While advances in computing have enabled the development of more precise and accurate flood models, there is growing interest in the role of crowdsourced local knowledge in flood modeling and flood hazard assessment. In an effort to incorporate the "wisdom of the crowd" in the identification and mitigation of flood hazard, this public participation...

Feedback has been studied as a strategy for promoting energy conservation for more than 30 years, with studies reporting widely varying results. Literature reviews have suggested that the effectiveness of feedback depends on both how and to whom it is provided; yet variations in both the type of feedback provided and the study methodology have made...

Providing households with energy feedback is widely promoted as a conservation strategy and its effectiveness has been established in field studies. However, such studies actively recruit participants and little is known about naturalistic consumers. Despite hundreds of products emerging, few have taken hold in the market. Diffusion of innovation i...

Much scholarship has been devoted to the substantive, normative, and instrumental arguments in favor of a participatory approach to decision making and the management of environmental risks. However, there is considerable less research aimed at bridging the theories of ideal citizen participation with its technical implementation in the field. Wi...

This paper introduces and presents preliminary findings from the Citizen Muscle Bootcamp (CMB), an online learning program designed by The Story of Stuff Project for environmental activism. We first introduce the program and its potential to leverage online learning for citizenship training. Next, we report findings from two pilot studies in which...

To improve requirements engineering education and training, experience reports serve as guidance on how courses can be taught and which methods and approaches work with specific types of audiences. One problem when teaching undergraduate audiences is often a lack in motivation for the course because of misconceptions about requirements engineering...

Residential energy conservation is among the most efficient means of reducing emissions, yet behavior is lagging behind this potential, suggesting this is an area where psychology can contribute. Research suggests that conservation behaviors may cluster into distinct dimensions, and a greater understanding of these differences could improve interve...

N ew forms of media and technology are changing how people interact with our natural, built, and social worlds. As the incoming editor of Ecopsychology recently stated, we are indeed a technological species (Kahn, 2013), and we must take our technological nature into consideration in our work as psychologists. We now live in a world with not only p...

Psychological research indicates that the provision of feedback is a key element in reinforcing and/or changing behavior, and whilst results from empirical studies on eco-feedback are positive, variation in findings suggests that its effectiveness may depend on both what information is provided and how it is presented. The design of graphical displ...

This paper proposes and tests the Usability Perception Scale (UPscale), developed to evaluate the perceived usability of eco-feedback. This tool builds on previous system usability scales and includes sub-scales for ease of use and engagement. The scale was tested via an online survey of 1103 US residents. Factor analysis supported a two-factor sol...

Feedback is a promising strategy for energy conservation, and many energy feedback products (i.e. technologies with hardware) and platforms (i.e. technologies without hardware) have emerged on the market in recent years. Past research suggests that the effective- ness of feedback varies based on distinct characteristics, and proposes categories to...

Although teachers have been using film in the classroom for decades, there is a growing trend for filmmakers to create supportive materials and programs for educators to integrate their films into school programming. Student populations can be extremely valuable assets to the educational and engagement goals of issue-based and documentary films. Li...

The current paper introduces and presents a preliminary pilot study of the Guided Research Applied Sustainability Project (GRASP) model for sustainability education. GRASP integrates curriculum, research, operations and engagement at the university level to create specialized projects that both engage students with real world issues and provide usa...

Residential energy conservation is among the most efficient means of reduc- ing emissions, yet behavior is lagging behind this potential, suggesting this is an area where psychology can contribute. Research suggests that conservation behaviors may cluster into distinct dimensions, and a greater understanding of these differences could improve inter...

Although films have been engaging and inspiring audiences throughout their history, new information and communication technologies have opened up a whole new set of opportunities for film to serve as an agent for social change. One organization that has recently garnered attention for utilizing film as tool for social change is Invisible Children (...

Residential energy feedback is widely promoted as a promising form of persuasive technology based on its effectiveness in field studies. However, previous research has treated “feedback” as a unified construct, despite a wide variety of device types and categories, and has devoted little energy to understanding how or for whom feedback works. An im...

Most people would agree that films can significantly impact individual attitudes and cultural narratives, but little research has sought to empirically measure these impacts. It is becoming increasingly important for documentary (and other issue-based) films to justify costs by providing data on the social “return on investment”, but care must be t...